Quoting Bernhard Eversberg <[email protected]>:
About any particular book, there can be many "statements" out in the
open world of the Web. Provided there is a stable, reliable, unique,
universally used identifier, going with every suchj statement, you're
very nearly there.
I made the mistake of using a term without identifying it, sorry. In
semantic web terms, this is a "statement":
Herman Melville -- is author of -- Moby Dick
It is a 3-part data construct. The full description of a book will be
made up of many statements. The big difference between what we do
today and the "recordless" view is that each of these statements is
able to be used independently of the context in which it was created.
Making up an example (always dangerous), let's say that the Wikipedia
article about Melville has the information that he wrote Moby Dick,
and a library bibliographic record has him as the author of Moby Dick,
and an essay on American literature has the same information. The idea
of the semantic web "statement" is that these could all be structured
in the same way. That would mean that a query on the web (a semantic
query, not a keyword search) could ask: who wrote Moby Dick? and it
would come up "Herman Melville, and here's a bunch of places that talk
about him as author of that book."
While library records today have that same information, it doesn't
make sense outside of the record so you can't share it or link to it
in other contexts. We have separate fields for the author and the
book, and the connection between them is that they are in the same
record. But take them out of the record and the connection is lost. In
the semantic web view, each statement makes a connection between two
things, and you can string the statements together to make a web of
statements. (Sorry this is getting pedantic -- I'm trying to make it
interesting, really!)
Here's the example from my recent Library Technology Report:
"Akira Kurosawa was the director of Shichinin no samurai (also known
as the Seven Samurai), which was adapted as The Magnificent 7,
directed by John Sturges."
Shichinin no samurai -- was directed by -- Akira Kurosawa
Shichinin no samurai -- has alternate title -- Seven Samurai
Shichinin no samurai -- was adapted as -- The Magnificent 7
The Magnificent 7 -- was directed by -- John Sturges
In today's record, we would code this somewhat like:
100 $a Kurosawa, Akira $e director
245 $a Shichinin no samurai
246 $a Seven Samurai
500 $a Adapted as "The Magnificent 7"
730 $a Magnificent 7
The information about Sturges would be in the record for Magnificent
7, so the user would have to go to that record to get that
information. In the Semantic Web the user could navigate directly to
that information because it would be linked due to its structure and
identity, just as a hyperlink today takes you to the other document
using Web protocols. The key thing here is that you are creating an
unending (hopefully!) network of links, not separate records.
For us today, without the record around our fields, the meaning of the
relationships between the fields don't exist. So if you were to take
the 730 out of the record and try to do something with it, you can't
-- you have to drag the whole record around with it for it to have
meaning, so it isn't very usable.
All of that said, the "statement" form can obviously be derived from a
record that looks something like what we do today. It becomes much
more useful if the relationships are better expressed than we do now:
after all the 246 and 730 could mean many different things. Humans
reading our records generally figure them out, but for machine
processing we will get better results if those relationships are
clearer.
This is probably a very flawed description of something that is
extremely hard to describe. I hope I haven't just made things worse.
--
Karen Coyle
[email protected] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
